Archives for December 2020

Tuesday December 9, 2020 (16 days til Christmas)

Election Day -36

43 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Last night I saw four maps showing the number of new cases of Covid in the U.S.

One map was three months ago. Mostly yellow with a little bit of red. (Red being bad.)

The next map was two months ago – Red along the Mississippi up to Ohio and over to Iowa.

Then one month ago – Red in the midwest, the great plains and inching into Nevada.

The last map was now – Essentially the whole country is red.

Interestingly, the red started in the red Republican states and infected the rest of us.

I couldn’t help but think that the spread could be shown to be from the Sturgis Bike Festival and Satan’s rallies team up with Republican governors ignoring the threat because it was politically unappetizing and acting too late when it was – well too late. (Yes, I said it already.) Even now they are acting slowly and sullenly.

Meanwhile, idiots with guns are showing up outside of the Michigan Secretary of State’s house demanding she “Stop the Steal.” I have to wonder how many of those people were the same one’s who showed up outside the Michigan governor’s house because she issued an order for people to wear masks.

In Arizona the Republican party issued a tweet (press announcment?) asking if folks were ready to die for a cause. The cause being stop the steal, or was it wear a mask? Does it matter?

Now we have vaccines coming along. Trump wants them named after him, or was it just Geraldo who wanted that? No, Trump should get the pandemic named after him, not the vaccine. Maybe, Moderna’s vaccine should be called “The Dolly Parton”? 

Apparently Satan used one of the three adjectives he knows when he heard the news that 15% of the country might be infected with Covid. – “Terrific”. This is where these idiots get dangerous. They are thinking about this herd immunity nonsense. It doesn’t work. Not by getting Covid. Well, maybe it does? Let’s explore that a bit. Okay, you get Covid. You spend a month or two or three lying in a hospital bed. Gasping for air. A team comes in every four hours to flip you over. You spend four hours on your stomach gasping for air, then four hours on your back gasping for air. It feels like you are breathing through jello. Eventually, you survive. Your lungs are scared and your breathing is greatly reduced. Your nerve and immune systems are screwed up. Maybe, you have Guillian-Barre Syndrome of which there is no known cure. Your body tingles all over and you slowly paralyze, but with treatment and lots of it you should be able to walk without support in one to five years.

But why dwell on the negative? Well, I’m not. I’m only mentioning one of about twenty things that could happen to you medically that NIH has discovered so far about Covid-19.

In other news, Ron Desantis, the governor of Florida, who won by cheating and is a big Trump fan has told his pal in the White House that he can’t declare Donald the winner in his state. What courage. Well, maybe he just didn’t talk to Satan. We know he refused Satan’s call while he was in the process of certifying the election. But that isn’t what I wanted to mention. He had Florida authorities break into the home of the scientist who used to keep the records of Covid outbreaks in Florida for the government – guns drawn, yelling and screaming. Why? Well, she got fired for reporting the facts. She continued to do so after she got fired. They didn’t like that. I’m sorry I’m making an assumption. Forget that. They were concerned that a call was made to a government source and that is not allowed. So therefore you need to be=reak into the house of a young woman, a nerd, and force her and her children out of the house while you ransack it. 

Some may say I’m jumping to a conclusion about DeSantis ordering the raid. Yeah> Who else would/

These people are idiots. Dangerous idiots. Being manipulated by fascists. The Republicans yell about liberals and socialism. The real threat we face now is stupidity and fascism.

Have a Nice Day. Get your holiday shopping done. Sorry. Christmas shopping. 

Monday December 8, 2020 (17 days til Christmas)

Election Day -35

44 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Yesterday I saw an article entitled “Don’t Chase the Vaccine Stocks” or something like that. This really pissed me off.

I don’t give investment advice. I tell people what I do. But I’m going to make an exception today and give you some investment advice.

DO SOMETHING!

Okay, that’s it.

Here’s the #1 Blunder most people make. Are you ready?

They DO NOTHING!

That’s it. Period. Full Stop.

Anything else I do or say is an expansion on the above advice and blunder to avoid.

I’ve been interested in investing since I was 18. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Trusted people I should not have, etc. etc. etc. I have developed a strategy that works for me and I have from time to time told people what I’m doing in the hopes that they will TAKE CHARGE OF THEIR FINANCES!

Now how you choose to do that is up to you. You can let someone else do it or you can do it. However, in my experience NO ONE WILL DO IT BETTER THAN YOU. 

You may question that, and that’s okay. If you let someone else do it then I suggest that you PAY ATTENTION. If you do it yourself realize that you are at bat. If you hit 4 out of 10 in baseball you are a winner. In other words, there will be losers along with the winners.

If you are interested in getting my emails about investing (not advice, just notes as to what I’m doing) message me with an email address and I’ll include you. In general I have found that – No one does what I do. Which is okay. Everyone must follow their own path.

Okay, with the above said let me tell you what pissed me off. Fischer Investments has an ad which I saw yesterday. They say they are better than most money managers and that if you have $500K come see them. They’ll charge you 2% to invest your money. You can do some spreadsheet compound interest to see how much 2% will cost you over time. If you don’t pay attention maybe they’d be a good way to go. They also say the biggest blunder you can make is to invest in one stock. More on that later.

Next I saw the article, maybe two articles, saying Don’t chase the vaccine stocks and you better watch out on vaccine stocks.

All that pissed me off. Why?

Well, okay, I get why it could be a bad idea to invest in only one company. If it goes south you’re screwed. A money manager would never do that because they don’t want to take that chance. Should you? Probably not. However, I think of a buddy of mine who put all his money in Apple when Steve Jobs came back … 

But here’s the question I have for the “Don’t Chase The Vaccine Stocks” and “Don’t Put All Your Money into One Stock” folks.

My question is “Have you ever seen a situation like this?”

In other words, can anyone think of a situation in world financial history where the world faced a global pandemic and the solution is that the world will need to get vaccinated? Yes, there have been diseases and pandemics: smallpox and the 1918 Flu. 

But here we have something that took over the world in less than a year. Now we have vaccines on the way. Is there anyway the makers of those vaccines aren’t going to be successful?

Yes, you say. The vaccine could fail. Ah yes, that was not my question. 

If a company has a vaccine that works, can it fail? Maybe, there’s a way. I don’t see it. I see a huge potential. So I say take some money and invest it in the vaccine makers.

Back in the spring there were a lot of candidates. Too many to really follow for my taste, but I bought a little Moderna at the time because Anthony Fauci said it was very promising. I’ve found if I don’t buy the stock I won’t watch it. Therefore if I’m really interested I buy a little.

I had also pulled 30% out of the market in the spring anticipating a crash. In November as it became apparent that there were fewer candidates I bought in a little bit more. Over the course of the year I had bought some of the companies that claimed to have antidotes or a vaccine on the way. Some of them did okay. Some of them didn’t.

As it became clear that Pfizer and it’s German partner Biontech had a vaccine I bought both. It was also clear that Moderna had a vaccine similar to Pfizer  and that it could be stored at a temperature that most people had facilities to keep as cold as they needed. The technology is new(er) and better than what has come before.

I thought Moderna would rise more than Pfizer even if both vaccines were similarly successful just because Moderna is a smaller company. I also bought the German company more heavily than Pfizer for the same reasoning.

I think about Davie Gardner of Motley Fool. He recommended Amazon five times in a row back when it first started. Many folks suggest that when a stock doubles you should sell half and then ride on the free money. Great I say, but what if you only invested a little at the beginning? How do you determine when you are fully invested in a company and should cut back? From the experts I get the “Ah there’s the art” speech.

I think about an old buddy of mine who said he had an uncle who liked to bowl. The guy had a huge hook in his form. The ball would teeter on the edge of the alley then curve in to hit the pins in the sweet spot. People would come up to him and say, “you know if you …” He smile and ask, “What’s your average?” They’d tell him and then ask his. “270,” he’d say. That usually ended the advice.

I am willing to put my average up against any advisor. Granted, it’s me and it’s a small account versus having to manage a billion dollars, and it’s taken me fifty years of dabbling and paying attention and understanding what works for me to get to where I feel comfortable even mentioning what I do.

PS Deflated manger scene with Jesus as Pumpkin Head.

Tuesday December 8, 2020 (17 days til Christmas)

Election Day -35

44 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

No. (The president should not be above the law.)

Next question.

Oh wait. What? It would set a bad precedent? Really? So if the president shot someone on Fifth Avenue and regardless of whether he (or she) lost votes should they be charged? 

Maybe, we should wait until they are out of office you say? So while in office they could continue shooting people? 

That’s the way I look at whether the president should be charged. 

Let’s look at the latest round of criminality. He has called up three swing state politicians and asked them to throw out the results of the election and give the election to him. That’s illegal. That’s trying to influence an election. People go to jail for that. 

Why should he be any exception? Oh, he’s the president and we don’t want to …

Wait a second you do not want to set a precedent? Andrew Weissman, the lead prosecutor on the Mueller Investigation outlined the problem. Suppose the president pardons himself and all his cronies and we let that stand? We have set a precedent. The precedent that you can do anything you want as president and you can’t get in trouble. There will be no point in having anymore special console investigations. What’s the point? You won’t charge the president while in office and he’ll pardon himself on the way out.

In other news, Rudy has Covid. He’s 76. He’s been going around the country appearing in front of various courts wearing no mask and taking group pictures afterwards. Besides spewing nonsense, he’s probably been spewing the virus. Who else has he infected?

In local Virginia news Amanda Chase has declared she will run for governor as an independent. She was too much for the Republican Party. I don’t know why. Was it the carrying a gun in her purse? Was it the demanding to park in front of the capital building because she didn’t want to walk from the parking lot? Was it the Quanon armed guys who are her supporters who tried to stuff the ballot box in Pennsylvania. Was it her insisting along with Satan that the election in Virginia was rigged and she attended many “Stop the Steal” rallies? It’s hard to say. Kirk Cox who is a Republican in the legislature, (maybe the speaker?) said her demagoguery was too much. Wow. Kirk seems like a normal kind of guy. Even Ms. Chase was too much.

The Biden transition team has been announcing appointments and get this – they are competent smart people! Wow. None of them are Biden’s kin. None of them are his golf buddies. 

Meanwhile, the president’s lackies are still doing whatever they can to gum up the works. At one point it was reported that the transition team was being blocked from meeting with Pentagon national security and intelligence agencies. The next day (two days ago?) it was reported “No no that’s all a misunderstanding. They didn’t make the proper requests. They didn’t go through the proper channels. It’s all cleared up now.” But yesterday it was reported that in fact one of the young hacks Donnie put over in the Pentagon has said in a meeting that they are to do everything they can to block the transition team.

In Georgia, David Perdue did not show up to debate his Democratic opponent last night. The thinking is that he like Lindsey Graham had determined that it’s better to stay away and not engage and just slide by. Perdue got skewered in his only debate. As far as I know he has done nothing to help people other than himself. He has traded on insider information numerous times. I guess he wants to keep his Senate seat so he can keep getting that intel? I have not heard him or his insider stock trading buddy, the other Republican senator, do anything for the people of Georgia or the country. Have you? Maybe I missed it. I doubt it.

Monday December 7, 2020 (18 days til Christmas)

Election Day -34

45 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

First off I wish to apologize for my bad spelling in the previous titled screed:

“Breath In, Breath Out” should have been “Breathe In, Breathe Out”.

My excuse is I went to The Dan Quail School of Spelling.

(Get it? Quail should be Quayle. Ha ha ha – potato po-ta-toe.)

Speaking of Dan, we went to the movies together. Alex and I went to see “A Few Good Men.” On the way out I saw this short little guy in a white wind breaker. He seemed like he was being childishly obstinate. A woman was bent over looking directly into his face, practically at right angles. Her body language seemed to be saying, “Well, what do you want?” His body language seemed to be saying, “I don’t wanna.” This after what I presumed to be an earlier parental comment from the woman of, “You can’t have that. It’s either A or B. C isn’t available.”

This was all taken in by me in a second or two. It was at this point in time that I realized it was Dan Quayle and his wife, Marilyn. She was considerably taller than he.

(Interestingly, the bio facts on-line say Dan is 6’0” and Marilyn is 5’ 5”or 6”)

That night I would have guessed him at 5’ 5” and she taller than that.

I turned to tell Alex who I was looking at. Alex was four or five. He had no idea and no interest. I had turned to my left to tell Alex and was beginning to turn my head back to my right when my view was blocked by a young man who seemed to be as wide as, well,  a Sumo wrestler. He was looking right at me. Chewing some pistachios I think.

I decided it was time to leave. Marilyn was still bent over Dan with that body language of “Well? What is it going to be?” and he “I don’t want to.”

But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you about. First off, it was snowing this morning.

I’ve missed the cold and not seeing snow. It’s beginning to feel a lot like – Inauguration Day.

While my coffee was heating up I flipped on the TV and they were talking about how 79 years ago today Pearl Harbor was attacked. One of the three historians on said something that really caught my attention, “Just because you aren’t looking for it, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.” This in regard to assumptions. 

I thought about Ayn Rand and the sentence she repeated over and over again in one of her books, either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. “Check your assumptions. One of them is wrong.”

I thought about Genghis Khan. How he was continually underestimated and how the opponents assumptions turned out, over and over again, to be wrong. When he attacked St. Petersburg he did so via the frozen river. They put cleats on their horses and walked on the ice. No one attacked from the river side. It therefore was not defended. His army walked right in.

Because all his men were on horseback they could cover fifty miles a day. The average army at the time would walk, covering seven to fifteen miles a day. On a forced march they could do twenty-five. Khan’s army would show up, capture a city, demand tribute, get it and be gone. The city, not seeing them anymore, assumed they were gone and stopped paying tribute. After a number of cities did this Genghis said enough and instituted new policies. He killed everyone. Why screw around? Bad assumptions on the earlier cities’ part.

What was the assumption on The Challenger? That it wouldn’t explode because none of the other space shuttle’s had? 

There is the discussion of “A Black Swan Event.” Something that seemingly comes out of nowhere and changes the course of events.

Some might argue that’s what happened with the Covid pandemic. But is that true?

It certainly is for the White House. In the sense that they knew it was coming and choose to ignore it and, I guess, hope it would go away. But even that is being generous. They knew. It’s not that they didn’t see it coming. Can you imagine if you were the captain of a ship in the Navy and you saw another ship coming straight for you and you did nothing? Especially, if you saw it, knew it, and had time to take action? But instead you did nothing. Just let it happen?

That is essentially what the White House did.

Most “out of the blue” events can be shown in retrospect to be known by someone. Yet they were ignored or discounted.

(To Be Continued)

PS Mincemeat!

Saturday December 5, 2020 (20 days til Christmas)

Election Day -32

47 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Well, we are getting a clearer picture of what Satan is up to over at the Pentagon.

A little while ago, a week or two, he replaced many of the top people with idiots. Not idiots but young junior loyalists who have no idea about anything in terms of the military. It wasn’t clear why. Now we are getting a better idea. It comes down to two things. But before I can elaborate we need to look at Operation Warp Speed.

The PR made it seem like OWS was to help develop the vaccine. Apparently, it wasn’t. It was to have in place the delivery process. 60 Minutes did a piece on the general heading it up. It sounded pretty good. 

We have now learned that OWS only goes up to January 20^th, Inauguration Day. Then it stops. So maybe it should be renamed Operation Warp Speed to the Bridge Abutment?

Now let’s return to the Pentagon. Satan put in a bunch of very junior supporters to run the Pentagon. The Biden transition team requested to meet with various military intelligence organizations and were refused by the yahoos. 

Satan has also set the budget to zero and gotten rid of people in another unit. The one that is in charge of fighting ISIS. I’m sure he’s saying we don’t need them we defeated ISIS.

So let’s review what Satan has done militarily. He pulled our troops out of Syria where they were protecting the Kurds, our allies. This let the Turks and the rest of Syria  slaughter them. He’s cutting way back on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan five days before he leaves office. And he’s gotten rid of the group that was keeping track of ISIS.

Now he’s got these young people in high level positions at the Pentagon who don’t know what they are doing and are refusing to let the Biden team meet with various intelligence agencies.

On the Covid front, the pandemic rages and he does nothing. 

One person suggested that he’s pissed because he didn’t get elected so he’s breaking as much as he can before he goes.

He is being aided and abetted by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate.

There’s all the commotion about the pardons. Will he won’t he? Blah blah blah. He will. There is a chance that he’ll resign a day early. Pence will take over and pardon him. I kind of hope that happens but Pence doesn’t pardon him. How cool would that be?

The hospitals are overwhelmed. Please stay home. For them. The doctors and nurses and health care workers. Wear a mask if you have to go out.

Rolling Stone did a neat thing last week. They had an issue where they paired various singer songwriters together and wrote about how one was influenced by the other. On the cover were Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift. As I dug back deeper into the issue I recognized fewer and fewer of the artists. I was okay with only knowing one of the two. But neither one? That’s a bummer.

PS It’s getting to be a lot like Christmas. Here I am watering my wife’s balls. No one wants dried shrunken balls at this time of year.